The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I’m a criminal justice researcher who often focuses
on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from
teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see
how the roots of racism in American policing – first planted centuries
ago – have not yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

Policing in southern slave-holding states had roots in slave patrols,
squadrons made up of white volunteers empowered to use vigilante
tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. They located and returned
enslaved people who had escaped, crushed uprisings led by enslaved people and punished enslaved workers found or believed to have violated plantation rules.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone’s home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments
that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and
soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and
elsewhere.

The first police forces were overwhelmingly white, male and more focused on responding to disorder than crime.

As Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Gary Potter explains, officers were expected to control a “dangerous underclass” that included African Americans, immigrants and the poor. Through the early 20th century, there were few standards for hiring or training officers.

Police corruption and violence – particularly against vulnerable
people – were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans
who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and
faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors –
controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite
officers and slave patrol origins – are among the forerunners of
modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But
formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government
policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and
where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They
also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

The ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 quickly made the Black Codes illegal by giving formerly enslaved blacks equal protection of laws through the Constitution. But within two decades, Jim Crow laws
aimed at subjugating African Americans and denying their civil rights
were enacted across southern and some northern states, replacing the
Black Codes.

On this day in 1917, Ell Persons, in his 50s, was lynched. He was accused of raping a white girl. He was beaten into a confession. He was doused with gasoline, burned alive and dismembered in front of thousands of spectators. Sandwiches and snacks were sold at the lynching. pic.twitter.com/hjTmKrAqTh

Reverberating today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the
use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of
color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the
police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper’s
database indicates that 229 out of 992
of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even
though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still
matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could.
For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement – even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

When a Stanford University
research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly
100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling,
they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to
have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the
percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark
when a driver’s complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

What’s more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan
to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take “diversity in criminal justice” courses.
This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make
future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of
others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will
make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the
workforce.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless
American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

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Connie Hassett-Walker is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Kean University in Union, New Jersey. She holds a PhD in Criminal Justice from Rutgers University (2007). Her dissertation ("Delinquency and the Black Middle Class") was awarded second place by the by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) for the 2006 Social Issues Dissertation Award. Prior to joining the faculty at Kean University, Dr. Hassett-Walker worked as a research associate at the Violence Institute of New Jersey, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now Rutgers University). In 2012, she received an AREA grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine the impact of justice system involvement on youths’ substance use trajectories. Her research has been published in a variety of scholarly journals including the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice. She is the author of Black Middle Class Delinquents (2009, LFB Scholarly Publishing); and Guns on the Internet:
Online Gun Communities, First Amendment Protections, and the Search for Common Ground on Gun Control (forthcoming in 2018, Taylor & Francis/Routledge). She blogs about crime & justice issues at http://njcriminologist.blogspot.com/.

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Can America and its Democracy withstand the attacks that are being made upon it from forces, not from without, but from within this country? What we desperately need, at this time, is a peoples’ revolution.

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